List of Jewish Nobel laureates

As of 2017, Nobel Prizes[note 1] have been awarded to 902 individuals,[1] of whom 203 or 22.5% were Jews,[note 2] although the total Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population.[2] This means the percentage of Jewish Nobel laureates is at least 112.5 times or 11,250% above average. Various theories have been made to explain this phenomenon, which has received considerable attention.[3][4][5] Prominent late Israeli academics Dr. Elay Ben-Gal and Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, curious about the phenomenon, started to form an encyclopedia of Jewish Nobel laureates and interview as many as possible about their life and work.[6]

"for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection"[158]

"for his pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics"[165]

"for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"[185]

"as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories"[192]

The Israeli city of Rishon LeZion has an avenue dedicated to honoring all Jewish Nobel laureates. The street, called Tayelet Hatanei Pras Nobel (Nobel Laureates Boulevard/Promenade), has a monument with attached plaque for each Nobel laureate. The scientific adviser of the project was Prof. Israel Hanukoglu.[273]

As of 2018, people of Jewish descent constituted 37% of economics, 25% of medicine, 26.2% of physics, 19.3% of chemistry, 13.3% of literature and 8.5% of individual peace awards.

As of 2018, as a percentage of years in which said prize has been awarded to a person of Jewish descent has been 50% of economics, 39.3% of physics, 38.5% of medicine, 25.5% of chemistry, 12.7% of literature and 7.1% of individual peace awards.

Brooks, David (January 11, 2010). "The Tel Aviv Cluster". The New York Times. p. A23. Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

Dobbs, Stephen Mark (October 12, 2001). "As the Nobel Prize marks centennial, Jews constitute 1/5 of laureates". j. Retrieved January 23, 2009. Throughout the 20th century, Jews, more so than any other minority, ethnic or cultural group, have been recipients of the Nobel Prize – perhaps the most distinguished award for human endeavor in the six fields for which it is given. Remarkably, Jews constitute almost one-fifth of all Nobel laureates. This, in a world in which Jews number just a fraction of 1 percent of the population.

Ted Falcon, David Blatner (2001). "28". Judaism for dummies. John Wiley & Sons. Similarly, because Jews make up less than a quarter of one percent of the world's population, it's surprising that over 20 percent of Nobel prizes have been awarded to Jews or people of Jewish descent.CS1 maint: Uses authors parameter (link)

Lawrence E. Harrison (2008). The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It. Oxford University Press. p. 102. That achievement is symbolized by the fact that 15 to 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews, who represent two tenths of one percent of the world's population.

Jonathan B. Krasner, Jonathan D. Sarna (2006). The History of the Jewish People: Ancient Israel to 1880's America. Behrman House, Inc. p. 1. These accomplishments account for 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes awarded since 1901. What a feat for a people who make up only .2 percent of the world's population!CS1 maint: Uses authors parameter (link)

Murray, Charles (April 2007). "Jewish Genius". Commentary. In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population.

^ ab"Walter Kohn Autobiography". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2011-10-19. They are dominated by my vivid recollections of 1 1/2 years as a Jewish boy under the Austrian Nazi regime... On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and – over the years – have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego.

^ abcdefgA remarkable week for Jewish Nobel Prize winnersThe Jewish Chronicle, October 10, 2013. "No less than six Jewish scientists were awarded Nobel Prizes this week... Belgian-born Francois Englert won the accolade in physics... Also this week, two American Jews were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine [...] James Rothman and Randy Schekman... Meanwhile, three Jewish-American scientists, Arieh Warshel, Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus, shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry... Karplus [...] fled the Nazi occupation of Austria as a child in 1938.

Radu Balescu. "Ilya Prigogine: His Life, His Work", in Stuart Alan Rice (2007). Special volume in memory of Ilya Prigogine, John Wiley and Sons. p. 2. "In the history of science, there are few examples of such a flashing and immense ascent as that of Ilya Prigogine (Fig. 1). The little Russian Jewish immigrant arrived in Brussels at the age of 12..."

Magnus Ramage, Karen Shipp (2009). Systems Thinkers. Springer. p. 277. "Prigogine was born in January 1917 in Moscow... His family 'had a difficult relationship with the new regime' (Prigogine 1977), being both Jewish and merchants...

^Herbert C. Brown, "Herbert C. Brown", in Tore Frängsmyr, Sture Forsén (1993). Chemistry, 1971–1980. World Scientific. p. 337. "My parents... came to London in 1908 as part of the vast Jewish immigration in the early part of this century."

^"Jerome Karle"Archived 2013-10-05 at the Wayback Machine, Profiles, Humanities and the Arts, City College of New York website. Retrieved September 10, 2011. "Jerome Karle is an American Jewish physical chemist who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with a fellow CCNY classmate, Herbert Hauptman"

^István Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai (2006). Candid Science VI. Imperial College Press. "Both Irwin Rose's parents came from secular Jewish families, on his maternal side, the Greenwalds originated from Hungary and on his paternal side, the Roses originated from the Odessa region of Russia."

^Joe Eskenazi. "Winning Nobel Prizes seems to run in one family’s chemistry—and biology".The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. October 12, 2006. "Arthur Kornberg – who still has his own lab at Stanford Medical School at age 88 – grew up in an Orthodox Brooklyn household, where Yiddish was the first language. His future wife, Sylvy Levy, also grew up Orthodox, but the couple raised their children in a fairly secular environment. Still, the family had a strong Jewish and pro-Israel identity, and Roger Kornberg is a consistent donor to the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation. Roger married an Israeli scientist, Yahli Lorch, a Stanford professor of structural biology, and they live almost half the year in their Jerusalem flat, where he leads his research team remotely via the Internet. "

Janice Arnold (2011-10-12). "Nobel laureate is pride of Sherbrooke Jews". Canadian Jewish News. "Shechtman was one of five Jews, including a former Montrealer, the late Ralph Steinman, to receive the prestigious prize for their scientific endeavours... Steinman and Bruce Beutler... won for their groundbreaking work in discoveries on the immune system. Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, both American Jews... won the prize in physics."

Looks, Elka (2011-10-05). "Jews make strong showing among 2011 Nobel Prize winners". Haaretz. "Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman has made headlines at home for winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry, but he is not the only Jewish recipient... Ralph Steinman and Bruce Beutler were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for their discoveries on the immune system... Saul Perlmutter and Adam G. Riess, both American Jews, are two of the three Nobel Prize in physics winners... So far, five of the seven Nobel Prize winners this year are Jewish..."

^Segel, Harold B. (2008). The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945. Columbia University Press. p. 20. ISBN978-0-231-13306-7"... the few Hungarian writers who have attempted to deal with Hungary's role in the ware and the fate of the Hungarian Jewish population have been mostly Hungarian Jews. Certainly the best known, due to his receipt of the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, is Imre Kertész (b. 1929)".

^Dagmar C. G. Lorenz (2007). Keepers of the Motherland: German texts by Jewish women writers. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 251–252. ISBN978-0-8032-2917-4. Jewish women's writing likewise employs satirical and grotesque elements when depicting non-Jews... Some do so pointedly, such as Ilse Aichinger, Elfriede Gerstl, and Elifriede Jelinek... Jelinek resumed the techniques of the Jewish interwar satirists... Jelinek stresses her affinity to Karl Krauss and the Jewish Cabaret of the interwar era... She claims her own Jewish identity as the daughter of a Holocaust victim, her father, thereby suggesting that there is a continuity of Vienna's Jewish tradition (Berka 1993, 137f.; Gilman 1995, 3).

^ abcPervos, Stefanie (11/5/2007). "Nobel Prize winners have Jewish, Chicago connections". JUF News. "Three Jewish scholars, two with Chicago connections, were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economic Science in October. Leonid Hurwicz, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and former researcher at the University of Chicago; Roger B. Myerson, a University of Chicago professor; and Eric S. Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, N.J., were honored for their joint work on mechanism design theory."

^Silverstein, Marilyn. "Nobel winner who's at home with Einstein", New Jersey Jewish News, November 8, 2007. "A native of New York, Maskin grew up in New Jersey, in a nonreligious Jewish home in the town of Alpine... But is he culturally Jewish? "Sure," he said. "It's a very rich culture, and I'm attracted to that side of it. I listen to klezmer — I'm actually a clarinetist myself. And there are certain Jewish foods I'm especially fond of — latkes, chopped liver, chicken soup with matza balls. I like to cook, and a lot of the things I cook have been handed down — a stuffed cabbage recipe I'm fond of, a meat pie recipe. I saw my grandmother do them."

^Paul Krugman (2003-10-28). "A Willful Ignorance". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-04-17. Sure enough, I was accused in various places not just of 'tolerance for anti-Semitism' (yes, I'm Jewish) [...]

^"Nobel Prize Laureates Boulevard", Structures, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, Spring 2011, p. 4. "Dr. Hauptman interestingly is one of 160 Jewish Nobel Laureates... In honor of this distinction, there is a boulevard dedicated to Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates in a town called Kiryat Hatanei Pras Nobel (Nobel Prize Laureates' Town) outside of Tel Aviv, Israel. On this boulevard, a monument and plaque have been dedicated in Dr. Hauptman's honor."